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Miss. speller in national semifinals

Published 7:00 p.m. CT May 27, 2015

Dev Jaiswal, 13, of Louisville celebrates making the semifinals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee with his mother, Hemlatta, and sister, Rani. The Mississippi Association of Educators in Jackson sponsored his trip.(Photo: Deborah Barfield Berry/Clarion-Ledger Washington Bureau)

WASHINGTON – Dev Jaiswal of Louisville notched a perfect score on a written vocabulary and spelling test on his way to qualifying for the semifinals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

“This is my dream, to make it to the semifinals,” Dev, 13, an eighth-grader at Winston Academy, said Wednesday after learning he would advance. “This is amazing.”

Dev was one of two Mississippi spellers competing in the national contest. Bates Bennett of Starkville advanced through the second and third rounds, but the 14-year-old from Starkville Academy didn’t do well enough on the written test to become one of the 49 spellers who survived to compete Thursday.

In his first appearance on stage Wednesday, Dev was given the word “bravura,” which means great technical skill.

“Do you have an amusing sentence?” he asked Jacques Bailly, the bee’s official announcer, before spelling it correctly.

In the third round, he handled “acesodyne,” which means relieving or mitigating pain.

Dev last competed in the bee in 2012, when he tied for 51st place without making it to the semifinals. His sister, Rani, competed in 2010.

This year’s bee began Tuesday with 283 spellers ranging in age from 9 to 15. One speller, Vanya Shivashankar, an eighth-grader at California Trail Middle School in Olathe, Kansas, is making her fifth try at the championship.

In addition to an engraved trophy, this year’s champion will receive $35,000, a $2,500 U.S. savings bond, a complete reference library and other prizes.

ESPN2 will show the semifinals live beginning at 10 a.m. Thursday. The finals air on ESPN beginning at 8 p.m. that day.

This is the third consecutive year spellers had to answer vocabulary and spelling questions on the bee’s written tests.

Since his last trip to the bee, Dev said, he has stepped up his studying, focusing mostly on the rules of different languages. He was confident he’d done well on Tuesday’s written test.

“He worked hard,” said Dev’s mother, Hemlatta. “I’m very proud of him.“